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Utopia by Saint Sir Thomas More
page 4 of 118 (03%)
unreason in high places that caused More to write the book. Burnet's is
the translation given in this volume.

The name of the book has given an adjective to our language--we call an
impracticable scheme Utopian. Yet, under the veil of a playful fiction,
the talk is intensely earnest, and abounds in practical suggestion. It
is the work of a scholarly and witty Englishman, who attacks in his own
way the chief political and social evils of his time. Beginning with
fact, More tells how he was sent into Flanders with Cuthbert Tunstal,
"whom the king's majesty of late, to the great rejoicing of all men, did
prefer to the office of Master of the Rolls;" how the commissioners of
Charles met them at Bruges, and presently returned to Brussels for
instructions; and how More then went to Antwerp, where he found a
pleasure in the society of Peter Giles which soothed his desire to see
again his wife and children, from whom he had been four months away. Then
fact slides into fiction with the finding of Raphael Hythloday (whose
name, made of two Greek words [Greek text] and [Greek text], means
"knowing in trifles"), a man who had been with Amerigo Vespucci in the
three last of the voyages to the new world lately discovered, of which
the account had been first printed in 1507, only nine years before Utopia
was written.

Designedly fantastic in suggestion of details, "Utopia" is the work of a
scholar who had read Plato's "Republic," and had his fancy quickened
after reading Plutarch's account of Spartan life under Lycurgus. Beneath
the veil of an ideal communism, into which there has been worked some
witty extravagance, there lies a noble English argument. Sometimes More
puts the case as of France when he means England. Sometimes there is
ironical praise of the good faith of Christian kings, saving the book
from censure as a political attack on the policy of Henry VIII. Erasmus
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